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5 Top Tips to Guarantee Success with Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a powerful tool which allows you to share information with your clients and make sure they know the extent of your services. Before you begin employing your email marketing strategies, you need to understand how to create an email that people will read and will not get you labeled as a spammer. A mass emailing to the wrong audience, or with the wrong message, can be a waste of time and money.

Email works best for marketing today when it can prompt a dialogue and encourage social sharing. The WIFM factor (What’s in it for me) for the recipient needs to be achieved in order to gain a click through on the hyperlink(s) in the email.

There are many critical success factors of Email Marketing – the top 5 are outlined below:

1. Choosing the Right Platform
There are many companies out there offering cost effective solutions such as Mail chimp with over 400,000 users. It comes with a flexible UI for building HTML email templates and for those feeling less ambitious, a free gallery of HTML templates are available. Building out campaigns, managing subscribers and pulling up reports are all simple, drag-and-drop affairs that anybody can handle. MailChimp is both highly extensible and extremely user-friendly, making this product ideal for non-technical users.

Much like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor offers state-of-the-art template and subscriber management, attractive campaign reports and speedy, safe email delivery. Since it’s targeted at Web designers, the Campaign Monitor platform can be easily rebranded and sold as a service to clients.

Emma aims for small businesses specifically with ‘a simple, stylish way to stay in touch with their customers, members and fans’. The company has long had a focus on stylish design and superb customer service. Their HTML template management is not quite as flexible as the other products mentioned above, but once you have your templates ready, deploying campaigns and analyzing the results is a cinch.

2. Permission-Based Email Lists
By creating a series of online marketing programs you will encourage people to sign up for your email list. Have a click box in your sign-up area that people can click to give you permission to send them emails about your upcoming offers. Building a permission-based email list can increase the chances that your message will be received and read.

3. Developing Compelling Content
To build and maintain a loyal readership, it’s important to provide content that is both interesting and relevant to your audience. The body of your email should be clean, easy to read and contain concise information that outlines your product benefits. Avoid adding graphics or unnecessary text that clutters up the screen and makes it difficult for the reader to find your sales pitch.

4. Subject Line
Your subject line can determine if the recipient receives and opens your email. Many spam filters are designed to stop emails that contain spam marketing words. To get past these spam filters try to create a subject line that will grab the reader’s interest. Make sure your subject line gives an honest representation of the email content and experiment with different subject lines until you have found one that is the most effective.

5. Analytics to measure success
During and after each campaign, carefully review your analytics to determine the best days and times to reach your audience, the content that generates the most hits, and what your readers are clicking on once they open your email. You can then use that data to help determine your content and distribution strategy for future mailings.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to create a dialogue with your customers. Take the time to identify the right platform and email design and be sure to deliver content that is both relevant and interesting to your audience.